J. S.

On today's date in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach, died in Leipzig. His worldly goods, including eight harpsichords and a valuable violin, were divided up between his wife and nine surviving children. But for posterity, the most valuable part of the estate were the piles and piles of manuscript scores of Bach's music. These, too, were divided up among the family. Miraculously, many have survived, but over time, many have also disappeared.

In 1850, to mark the centenary of the composer's death, the Bach Gesellschaft was founded in Leipzig to publish a complete edition of Bach's surviving works.

Fast-forward another hundred years or so, to 1945 . . .

World War II had just ended. Germany lay in ruins, and it was feared that one major German collection of yet-uncatalogued Bach family scores had been destroyed by Allied bombs. The collection had, in fact, been confiscated by a Red Army tank driver as war booty and sent by the KGB to a music conservatory in Kiev. There it stayed, unbeknownst to anyone in the West, until 1973, when the collection was transferred to another Soviet archive in the Ukraine.*

Tipped off by an East German librarian, Bach scholar Christoph Wolff tried for over twenty years to view this collection, and finally succeeded in the summer of 1999. Wolff didn't find any new works by J.S. Bach, but among the hundreds of manuscripts were unpublished pieces by Bach's two oldest sons, C.P.E. and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.